[wplug-bsd] FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE Printer Issues (PROBLEM IDENTIFIED)

[Benjamin Slavin]

Well, sir, I think we've found the problem.

It prints terribly slowly, but at 4k/sec, this is to be expected.

Now, to get lpd to limit itself to that speed. I assume that, since it
spools the job to disk before printing, this buffer needs to sit between
LPD and the printer, not between the filter and LPD. I attempted to hack
together a simple shell script to do this, thinking that by setting
lp=/path/to/script, the script would take the data to be printed via
STDIN, but found that it just wrote over the file instead.

Any recommendations for this last step?

Thanks so much,
  --Ben

[Sorry to Mr. Poyner who will receive two copies of this email... I 
accidentally sent a reply directly to him, and not to the list]

Poyner, Brandon wrote:

>It certainly sounds more and more like a problem with USB.  You might
>want to try slowing down the stream of data going into the printer,
>perhaps the printer buffer wigs out when it fills up completely?
>(doubtful but I'm just grasping at straws).  You could use this perl
>script as a pipe to stream ~4K/sec into the redirect to /dev/ulpt0.  
>
>#!/usr/bin/perl -w
>
>use strict;
>
>my $buf;
>
>while(read(STDIN, $buf, 4096)) {
>        print STDOUT "$buf";
>        sleep(1);
>}
>
>Brandon Poyner
>Network Engineer II
>CCAC - College Office
>412-237-3086
>
>  
>